Bea Arthur

The Little Mermaid, the movie that launched Disney's animated renaissance, premiered 25 years ago this Nov. 15. That might seem hard to believe for those of us who caught it in theaters, but we've had a quarter-century of snarfblats and dinglehoppers since then.

Bea Arthur famously sat around the kitchen table and sliced into cheesecake week after week as Dorothy Zbornak on TV's The Golden Girls. In real life, it seems, the late actress was a more health-conscious eater.

In The Dead Celebrity Cookbook, author Frank DeCaro has collected and presented an array of recipes by beloved (and dead) stars – everyone from Arthur to Frank Sinatra to Katharine Hepburn to Lucille Ball.

"I miss those days when celebrities still had mystery about them," DeCaro, formerly the movie critic for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, says about his decision to write the book. "A glimpse inside their radar ranges seemed, for any fan, like a window into the world of glamour and excitement."

With each recipe, DeCaro provides his commentary as way of an introduction.

For Arthur's chapter called Thank You for Feeding a Friend, which spotlights the actress's vegetarian breakfast recipe, he writes: "Food was always good for a giggle on The Golden Girls, too. Sophia could turn the word cannoli into a sexual double entendre, and Rose's Scandinavian recipes, her geneukenfleuken cake, for instance, were always played for laughs.

Beatrice Arthur, the larger-than-life actress who scored on Broadway as the original matchmaker in Fiddler on the Roof and the hard-drinking actress in Mame before she went on to star in the groundbreaking '70s TV series Maude and, in the '80s, the beloved sitcom The Golden Girls, died early Saturday morning. She was 86.

Dan Watt, a spokesman for Arthur's family, told the Associated Press that the star had been suffering with cancer, though he did not specify what kind. She died peacefully at her Los Angeles home with her family by her side, said Watt, who remembered Arthur as "a brilliant and witty woman."